


Personal Best

by toomanyhometowns



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Canon Divergence, Don't copy to another site, Gen, Weight Gain, blink-and-you'll-miss-her-479er, or maybe it's just set WAYYY in the future??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-13
Updated: 2014-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:28:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26446351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toomanyhometowns/pseuds/toomanyhometowns
Summary: After, Carolina joins a gym.
Relationships: Agent Carolina & Four Seven Niner (Red vs. Blue)
Kudos: 1
Collections: tumblrfic exodus





	Personal Best

**Author's Note:**

> It's the time of Quar when I upload ancient fic! I confess I stopped keeping up with RvB at a certain point during Chorus stuff, so this could be "nebulous future fic" or it could be "wildly AU", I'm not actually sure.
> 
> CW: a bit of body image stuff.

After, she joins a gym.

It opens at five A.M., which she is no longer supposed to call 0500. It’s probably worse that she has to think of it as both. She slips in at opening, sometimes early enough that she’s the one flicking on the light-switch in the weights room. Her metabolism lurches and slows and she spends two hours each day smelling the unfamiliar sweat of strangers, watching her body become something it hasn’t been since she enlisted.

There’s an ex-Grifball champ who also comes to the gym, someone tells her. "Right over there, see?" Carolina doesn’t know what he looks like, can’t pick him out from the line-up of early risers in poly-elastane blends.

Every morning, the two hours slip through her fingers before she can feel like she’s accomplished anything. Carolina’s deadlifting a fraction of what she’d done in the past, muscles trained to cooperate with armour now twitching, exposed and recalibrating from the memories she’d built into them for the better part of two decades. She boxes with a bag and the speed with which it bounces back amazes her, as does the sluggishness of her fists.

Carolina drinks a lot of water and her hunger doesn’t burn through her gut and bones and muscles the way she thinks it should. She buys pre-packaged meals and never needs to eat two at a time. The hard lines of her arms and torso soften, and she discovers what being drunk is like for the second time, avoids bourbon because that’s what the first time tasted like.

The day after she does that, there are two messages on her commercial-brand datapad when she wakes up hours late at 0800, eight A.M.: one she sent and one she received.

_How’s flying?_

_Could be better. The shit I’m doing now’s not as fun as what we had, psycho._

She works out and her body continues to shed muscle and accumulate an inevitable layer of fat. Carolina’s thighs kiss each other when she walks, and she’s benching twenty-two kilos in two sets of twenty-two reps.

A while after she joins the gym, she skips a day, then two.

She goes for a jog instead, despite the mediocre air quality in the city she ended up in. The jog doesn’t satisfy, and the gym didn’t satisfy, and Carolina’s in the worst shape she’s been in since she got her teenage growth spurt right before basic.

The sound of her panting breath in-out, in-out doesn’t echo, and she stops expecting it to. She wipes sweat off her face and collarbones and out from between her breasts and marvels just for a second at how easy it is to put skin to skin.

There’s another message waiting for her: _Up for leave, fucking finally. Do I have anywhere to be?_

The smile that curves her lips doesn’t cut anymore.

She feels recovered in a way, steadier and more secure even though she doesn’t think she can flip a hundred-kilo man over her back from a standing position anymore. She takes a nap in the sun and lets it sink into her skin until she can pick out freckles peppering her shoulders in pairs. The mirror tells her she’s glowing.


End file.
